When it comes to country music, it is the best of times, and the worst of times . . . depending on if you’re talking about male or female artists. While it’s easy to focus on the awful, strident, and inane music from mainstream country’s male-dominated ruling class, there is an inspiring sect of female performers attempting to emerge from the heavy shadows of towering males and their tiring musical pap.

Here at Saving Country Music, we’d like to think we were ahead of the curve proclaiming the women of country on an astounding creative clip compared to the men who appear to be headed in the complete opposite direction. Four months deep into 2013–a year some are now labeling “The Year of the Woman” in country music–and country’s gender gap is taken as a given, with many major news outlets running stories about how country music’s women are outpacing the men when it comes to creativity, authenticity, and leadership–women like Ashley Monroe, Kacey Musgraves, Kellie Pickler, Caitlin Rose, Lindi Ortega, and Holly Williams.

So the next question would be, why the gender gap?

During the music industry’s lost decade (roughly running from 2000 to 2010), the lone demographic the music business could still count on was females, which according to numerous surveys and studies purchases more music than men. While the industry struggled to find the right way to market and distribute music in the onslaught of the digital age, women and girls were less likely to illegally download music or download music at all, preferring the more traditional physical music formats (though it’s also been found illegal downloaders still by lots of music). Then as the music industry began to catch up to the technology trends later in the decade, women bucked their stereotype as technology novices and became the biggest buyers of digital music according to a recent Parks Associates survey.

This is the reason artists that appealed to girls and women, like Taylor Swift, became recession proof for country music. Even male artists that appealed mostly to women like Rascal Flatts did well during music’s lost decade. As Music Row in Nashville began to discover who they could count on to purchase music, we saw themes that appeal more to women dominate the country format. Songs mentioning “sippy cups” and sappy love stories sold well and so this became country’s prevailing trend.

Meanwhile on Madison Avenue and other influential epicenters of corporate America, companies began to catch on to the financially lucrative practice of gender marketing to men. Whereas before you would have products like shampoo and soft drinks that would either appeal to everyone or women specifically, now you began to see the gray bottle emerge on supermarket shelves, proclaiming them men-only products.

All of a sudden there was men’s shampoo, men’s soap, men’s body spray, and men’s lotion. This trend has recently exploded in the food world, with soft drinks like Dr. Pepper 10 advertising themselves as “not for women.” Red Barron released a line of frozen pizzas specifically targeting men in their packaging.

Bringing it back to country music, Music Row, like Madison Avenue, began to catch on that they’d been ignoring a huge demographic of the population. Discounting the financial impact of the male demographic began to take on a self-fulfilling progression, and to see the growth the industry needed to pull out of their recent losses, they needed to engage male listeners.

As the complaints began to grow louder about how country music was becoming wussified, we began to see the emergence of a new crop of male music entertainers whose songs relied on very simplistic structures that attempt to staunchly appeal to men–aka country music “laundry list” or “checklist” songs that simply list male-appealing cultural artifacts with little emphasis on story or theme. All of a sudden, songs redundantly listing off ice cold beer, pickup trucks, dirt roads, bass boats, fried chicken, etc. etc. became country music’s prevailing trend.

The results of this new gender marketing to males in country music has been successful, both financially and with industry accolades. The last round of both the CMA and ACM Awards saw male performers win the mixed gender “Entertainer of the Year” and “Album of the Year” accolades. Winners Blake Shelton, Jason Aldean, Luke Bryan, and Eric Church are now seen as the new generation of country music power franchises.

But what Nashville and Music Row have lost sight of is what this trend of simplistic lyrics–and the new trend of integrating them with rap–could do to the long-term viability and autonomy of the country format. Once again mainstream country music is making the mistake of ignoring half the population like they did during country’s female-dominated moment during music’s lost decade. It all seems to have lost sight of the uniting power of the song when the theme is universal, making gender, age, location, background, and political and religious affiliations irrelevant. These songs still exist in country music. They do. But they are rarely heard beyond the small but fervent fan bases of country’s new generation of female performers who are writing and signing them. It is in these performers, and these songs that country music could find the universal appeal needed for true financial stability and success.

23 Comments

Things will not change or get better as long as the A-hole program directors at the big Top 40 Airhead Country radio station chains keep approaching the music with formulas, topic and general style checklists, and any other analytical approach that does not consider the inherent quality of the music! Bean counters and focus group facilitators usually make lousy choices when selecting which new singles to spin. If these Einstein’s were ever able to grasp the great music with natural broad appeal is the proper way to establish and maintain a format, they might wise up a little.

Starting around 2004 I used to check the weekly Top 40 country charts to see how many solo female artists or female led groups were in that list of 40 songs. It started off averaging about 20% but over the years worked its way as low as 10%. I had already quit listening by the time Carrie Underwood and Taylor Swift became the top female artists so I didn’t care any longer.

I’m a fan of these new gals leading the charge and download and listen to their music without giving any thought to country radio. As long as I have blogs to steer me in the right direction, what country radio does these days remains irrelevant to me personally.

The song by Holly Williams has a vocal melody eerily similar to a song from Kip Moore, “Hey Pretty Girl.” Not sure which song came out first, but that’s something worth looking into. I think both songs are pretty good, but the similarity was striking to me.

As an amateur singer-songwriter who happens to be male, I am most troubled by the fact that the best artists in country are largely female, whilst the worst ones are largely male. Why must male artistry die? Why can’t there be any more quality male artists ever? Is this the apocalypse the Maya were talking about?!?

Anyways, here’s my take on the issue: That other genre based for the most part in Nashville, Christian music, has done likewise. The mainstream Christian artists you hear on KLOVE or Air1 are, for the most part, shitty male artists. The women are increasingly being purged by their labels, especially if they happen to be older artists. This has destroyed the Christian labels; one can only wonder if EMI’s death in 2010 was caused in part by the reckless purges of female/older artists on the part of its flagship Christian label, Sparrow Records.

Would that there were more male artists that kicked ass musically, yet could be accessible enough as circumstances warranted. I feel that the genre as a whole–both mainstream and underground–is headed for another 1980s, when the genre seemed to be dying. It breaks my heart to see male artists degenerate into lazy shits. I guess there’s always my favourite genre, progressive rock/metal…

They belong to satanist freemasonic covens, they are christians in name only. The ownership of the labels and the radio stations is interconnected. The same witches who have powers to make or brake a singer’s career are the same ones who control the contents of the radio stations playlists. They are the ones who killed off ‘Dixie Chicks’. To hell with them,

What this really boils down to is a major format shift in 2003. Christian radio (more commonly known in the industry as ‘Christian AC’) used to be pop-oriented, with adult-contemporary/soft rock thrown in for good measure. The ‘pop’ artists were predominantly female (like Avalon, Point of Grace, Amy Grant, et.c), while the ‘soft rock’ end tended to be more male (ie. Steven Curtis Chapman, Michael W. Smith, etc.). This trend basically existed from the 80s to the early 2000s.

Around 2003, Christian radio underwent a major format shift. For whatever reason, rock-oriented artists stormed Christian radio. It has remained that way since. The former ‘pop’ bands now struggle for airplay because their material doesn’t fit with the interests of the listener. Since there aren’t many females that can pull off the ‘rock’ vocal style and not be hard rock (at least in the Christian industry), you don’t see too many on the radio. Radio will play the old hits (not so much K-LOVE, but a local station of mine, 106.9 The Light, plays a ton of 90s to early 2000s material), but not new ‘pop’ songs from female artists. Really the only remnant of that era is the Soft AC/Inspirational format, which is extremely small (the top song this week scored about 1,000 audience impressions as compared to the 7.5 million of the Christian AC chart) but has a better support to older artists as well as females.

Now, this could just be a trend. CCM is only about 30-40 years old, comparatively young as compared to country, rock, or pop. The 2003 shift essentially amounts to the first major generational shift among listeners. We’re ten years through the ‘rock’ era, but in another ten years we could see a shift back to the ‘pop’ side being dominant. Quite frankly you can’t predict anything, due to both the format’s young nature and the sudden takeover of rock, but I will say this will not last forever.

This reminds me of an article I read in the mid-’90s — I clipped it and still have it, in fact — originally written by Mario Tarradell for the Dallas Morning News, reprinted in the Omaha World-Herald, “Outspoken Women Make Country Radio Nervous.”

In it, Lon Helton (who was the country editor for ‘Radio & Records’) is quoted as saying, “Radio is entertainment, and most programmers feel that people want pretty upbeat, bright entertainment from their radio 90% of the time… Every time you use the radio, you are doing something else, you’re not really sitting there paying attention to lyrics. The songs that are really meaningful take a little longer to sink in.”

That’s probably even truer now, nearly two decades later; as radio has become less and less relevant, what little time people have to spend listening to it, they’re more likely to want something immediately feel-good than remotely challenging.

Unfortunately, that’s no way to sustain a genre/format and keep it from becoming a bad parody of itself.

I hope the Nashville Powers That Be eventually recognize this, and maybe open things up a little to different voices and viewpoints — who knows what listeners (those who primarily listen to radio and simply don’t have the time or energy to go hunting around online to find out what “the good stuff” is) might enjoy or even find themselves relating to, if only they knew it existed and were given a chance to hear it?

Good point. I probably should’ve clarified that, by “challenging,” I was thinking of simply anything beyond the usual cliche` images, countrier-than-thou attitude, and big, dumb hooks.

But yeah, thinking about SCM’s recent best-songs list, a lot of those classic songs strike me as textbook examples of the beauty of simple songcraft — fairly straightforward storytelling (whether funny, sad or uplifting) or direct expressions of emotion that aren’t dumbed-down or too cliche`d. And if people are still making that kind of music today, I think there would be a real audience for it if only it had the proper exposure.

Hell, why try hard to write a song that has any depth to it, when you can sell the low hanging fruit to a bunch of knuckle dragging, mouth breathers? You can crank those turds out as fast as you can grunt. Who needs Kristofferson? Just keep telling me how great my F150 is!

My working theory is that today’s country women haven’t had much success with the countryisms and male dominated songs… Look at Gretchen Wilson, she is history… So, since they aren’t appealing to that demographic, they have set their sites on us, the people who long for tradition and meaning. We were a fanbase needing a mainstream star, they were mainstream stars needing a fanbase. Match made in heaven. Not to say all the women make earnest music just to tap into our pockets, but it had to be in the back of their mind. Or the front of the labels minds, since they have allowed this stuff to be put out… Just an idea.

It is interesting to note that Gretchen Wilson was one of the very first “New Outlaws” who both released laundry list-style songs and also released a song that criticized mainstream radio (Outlaws & Renegades), while sounding just like the arena rock crap she was supposedly criticizing. This is the one lone female artist who attempted to go down this road, but as you note, was not very successful doing it.

I’ve s tarted listening less and less to country radio because it just doesn’t play what I want to hear. Thank god we still have artists like Kellie Pickler, Kacey Musgraves, Ashley Monroe, and Holly Williams. And I’m sure there’s tons out there that I’ve yet to discover. I guess some of these ladies realize they’re not going to be played regularly on country radio anytime soon, so why not make the music they want to make which is traditional!

I do think it’s worth noting that the huge mainstream artists are capable of making the “good” kind of country too. Blake Shelton comes to mind. Listen to his duet with Ashley Monroe on her latest album “Like A Rose” and you will see. Carrie Underwood is also another one. Her classic country covers in concert are good and she did a fantastic rendition of “You’re Looking At Country” on the Loretta Lynn tribute album last year. I wonder what artists like Blake and Carrie could do if they were let loose in the studio to make a record without the suits and ties telling them every move to make.

This whole “gender gap” idea seems kind of silly to me. Sure, I guess if we’re talking about mainstream country radio, the females you’ve mentioned (Miranda, Kacey) are making better music than the guys (Aldean, Shelton, Bryan, etc), I’ll grant you that. But the other girls you’ve mentioned like Kellie, Ashley Monroe. Ortega aren’t getting played on the radio. And there are just as many male country singers making GREAT friggin music that aren’t getting mentioned here if we’re trying to compare the two sexes. I just think alot of male artists are getting ignored in this discussion.

I understand what you are saying, but both Kellie Pickled and Ashley Monroe had their last albums put out by major Nashville labels, and have received radio play, however slight. Ashley had two songs featured in last week’s episode of “Nashville” on TV.

I agree there’s some great guys as well, but they’re rarely reaching the mainstream level. Ice posted numerous articles highlighting them, but I’m planning another one soon talking about some male artists who could close the talent gap.

No doubt that you’re right on saying that the males are rarely breaking through to radio. I just thought it was a little bit of a reach to say that the ladies are beating out the guys in terms of overall good music. And don’t get me wrong, the women that are mentioned are all really talented. I’ll be looking forward that piece that you mentioned.

Also, I’m absolutely loving the song “Wine” with Rachel Brooke on Fifth On The Floor’s new album. It’s a great effort by her and to me that album gets better every time through it.

Noticing a lot of comments on here about the sorry state of commercial country radio. For those of you who have a smart phone, might I suggest the TuneIn app – it allows you to listen to any radio station with an online stream from anywhere in the world (the whole world). There are a lot of public radio stations with specialty shows, such as “Swingin’ Doors” on KEXP in Seattle, that play real country without all the crud. Old, new, traditional, alt-country, local, national, international, male, female – it’s all in there. And no Taylor Swift.